This book is a unique collection of papers on the languages and cultures in the northern areas of Pakistan and the surrounding regions. In a single volume, the editors have compiled the work of a variety of national and international scholars, long concerned with the linguistic aspects of the many languages discussed here. The basis for most of the articles is material collected in areas difficult to access, presented here in print for the first time. The material sometimes concerns languages likely to soon disappear. The different chapters reflect many of the complex regions and languages of northern Pakistan and its surrounding areas, thus being of interest to linguistic scholars across the world. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Carla Radloff, who was a well-known contributor to studies of the languages of northern Pakistan until her untimely death in 2012.

This book provides a practical and easy-to-understand introduction to acoustic speech analysis, primarily aimed at those involved in linguistic analysis and description in the field and at those preparing for such fieldwork. It explains commonly used methods for displaying aspects of a speech wave, such as waveform graphs, spectra, spectrograms, fundamental frequency graphs (pitch graphs), and intensity graphs. It illustrates how the results of acoustic analysis can be interpreted and used to improve the objectivity, accuracy and precision of phonetic descriptions of speech sounds. The book assumes basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics. It can be used to teach introductory courses in acoustic phonetics at the undergraduate level.